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Friday, March 29, 2019

RITA HAS A SO-WHITE MOMENT

Last week the Romance Writers of America® announce the
finalists in its annual RITA® contest for published authors. Amid the usual
excitement and squeals of delight for and from the honored authors there came first
a whisper, then a rumble, then a howl of outrage that, again this year, there
were no authors of color (AOC) among the writers named. Not just no black
authors, but no Latinx authors, no LGBTQ authors, and damn few characters
representing these communities either. Again.

From these communities within RWA® legitimate
anger and frustration was expressed openly, particularly in the Professional
Authors Network (PAN) loop. And that’s when the trouble really began. Because some of the things said in response to criticism
of the RITA® process only served to prove the point that there is an underlying
structure of bias, prejudice, even racism and sexism within RWA®. (Here’s a
thought: When entering a discussion on color, don’t start by saying, “I don’t
see color.” If the subject is racism, don’t begin with the line, “I’m not a
racist, but . . .”)

Not surprisingly, the online discussion
rapidly degenerated into name-calling, self-justification and personal bullying,
until the RWA® President was forced to step in and call at least one individual
out.

I won’t address the larger questions of RWA®-so-white
here except to say that the organization that was co-founded by a black author
has seen a lot of changes since the 1980s, even since 2009 when I first joined.
Not all these changes have been positive. This bigger, “more professional” RWA®
is not more inclusive, or more open, or more encouraging to newer writers, or
indies, or AOC or authors of any marginalized populations than it used to be. I
see this as a loss, both for RWA® and for those authors and their readers, or
potential readers.

RITA:Not so shiny now? Maybe some changes are in order.

At least the uproar over
this year’s RITA® nominations did have one positive outcome—the President
announced changes would be made to the way the contest would be judged in the
first round in future years to avoid some of the worst of the biases we’ve seen
in past years, biases that were painfully clear in some of the comments on the
PAN forum. (See the President’s statement here.)

One person, for example, said for personal
reasons, she only read books with the hero’s POV, never the heroine’s. She refused to read anything in first-person POV, either. Can you imagine this person as a judge?
Many people said they couldn’t relate to a character of color, or a non-hetero
couple. How could they be fair judges? And if this is their reaction to anything outside a narrow band of their own experience here on Earth, how open would they be to anything set on another world, or with otherworldly beings?

The problem is not necessarily that anyone
who enters the RITA® must be a first-round judge. It is that untrained and inexperienced judges are
given NO technical criteria by which to judge the books they are given. Judges
must answer only three questions about each entry: Does the entry contain a
central love story? Is the resolution of the romance emotionally satisfying and
optimistic? Does the entry fall within the category description? Then the entry must be awarded a point score based on . . . whatever. If an individual judge has
experience with judging chapter contests, s/he will use those technical criteria
on characterization, plot, pacing, etc. to make a judgment. If not, the judgment will
be subjective and very open to individual bias (eg. I don’t read first-person POV; I can’t
relate to black heroines. Aliens? Yuck!) Without any real criteria to go by, judges rely
on cronyism, author popularity/name recognition and “what I like.” If we made
the RITAs a reader-based contest, this kind of thing would only get worse.

Every year the contest organizers ask for our feedback;
every year I’ve said we need to institute real technical criteria for judging. Even better, we need to train judges. We did that at my Virginia Romance Writers chapter, and VRW
ran one of the most respected chapter contests in the nation, the Holt
Medallion contest. It seems to me the national organization should look to its
chapters for help as it reorganizes this contest.

Lest you think, as an indie writer or an
SFR author, that this controversy has no relevance to you, I would ask you to
consider just why, year after year, there are so few SFR titles nominated for RITA®,
so few indie or self-published authors nominated. Peers should nominate peers, but
the categories are constructed to force paranormal and SFR writers to compete
against each other, rather than judge each other, as we should. Very few
authors (or readers, really) read broadly across categories. So the cronyism
works against little-known or “niche” writers like SFR authors. I continue to
suggest, year after year, that SFR be split off from the paranormal category so
contestants in these two genres can judge each others’ work. At least an author
of vampire romances that require some world-building would be better placed to understand my novels than an
author of small-town contemporaries.

But maybe this year, RWA® will be more open
to suggestions like mine. I urge you, too, to contact the leadership with your
own ideas as to how the RITA®s can be improved. Act now, before this contest
goes the way of the late, lamented Golden Heart®.

4 comments:

Hear, hear, Donna! Beautifully stated. I added my two cents on one of the big author group forums, but the discussion there only served to showcase how incredibly complex and problem-prone the RITA re-work is going to be. Members and RWA officials have their work cut out for them, but hopefully this "roar" will push the organization toward new and fresh ideas to revamp the RITA to level the playing field for ALL authors and ALL romances.

And as to your comment on the Paranormal category, YES! I've also been engaged in a back-and-forth with RWA staff about the "conglomerate" Paranormal category for years! Maybe this is the time to suggest a change, since they're looking at revamping the entire contest. My suggestion was this: Break the Paranormal category into three distinct subcategories--Fantasy for vampire/werewolf/witch/elf/etc., Paranormal for ghost/angel/demon/shapeshifter, etc. and Science Fiction for sci-fi/steampunk/futuristic/time travel--and THEN if there aren't enough entries to justify an individual category, combine two or more back into the conglomerate Paranormal.

Recognizing this is a distinct and separate issue from what started the outcry, I noticed a number of members raise this as a side issue, so if RWA is going to change for the better, maybe now is the time to also suggest fixes for some of it's other problems, especially those impacting the SFR genre, specifically.

Any members of RWA who are considering writing a letter to the organization with ideas on the restructuring of the RITA Awards, and specifically the breakup of the paranormal category, there's a letter template available that authors can borrow from or edit as they like.

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Hosted by 5 Science Fiction Romance authors with 8 RWA Golden Heart finals and a RITA final between them. We aim to entertain with spirited commentary on the past, present, and future of SFR, hot topics, and our take on Science Fiction and SFR books, television, movies and culture.

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